For instructions on how to use the footnotes and bibliography in this section, see Note to Visitor.

He who, without Fame, burns his life to waste
leaves no more vestige of himself on earth than
wind-blown smoke, or foam upon the water
 —Dante, Inferno, 24:49–51

The key to Leonardo's legacy is without doubt to be found in his extant drawings and accompanying manuscript notes, for the number of his extant paintings is very small (at most fifteen, if one were to count generously finished and unfinished works, autograph and partly autograph works). None of his projects for sculptures seems to have reached a finished state (see cat. nos. 53, 63, 64, 101–4, 111, 118). At least two of his murals in Milan are in such damaged condition that they represent a pale semblance of his original intentions (the Last Supper, Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie [cat. no. 65], and the Sala delle Asse, Castello Sforzesco). Even during his lifetime, his inability to finish projects was legendary. Piero Soderini, the gonfaloniere di giustizia (the elected chief government official) of the Florentine Republic, complained on October 9, 1506, to the representative of the French king in Milan about Leonardo's failed Battle of Anghiari mural: "he made a very small beginning of a very large thing."¹ When Pope Leo X, the brother of Giuliano de' Medici, Leonardo's patron in Rome from 1513 to 1516, learned that Leonardo was incessantly fussing over recipes for varnishes, instead of painting, he is said to have exclaimed, "Alas! This man will never do anything, for he begins by thinking about the end before the beginning of his work."² In this context it is nearly miraculous, especially if one considers the fragility of paper, that an enormous body of drawings by Leonardo survives—more than four thousand, if one counts every scrap of paper with sketches and diagrams, and all the pages bound in his notebooks. (Notebooks and albums offer a significant means of protecting works on paper.) The quantity of Leonardo's extant drawings is about four times the corpus of even the most prolific sixteenth-century draftsmen. Famous for their beauty and technical virtuosity, his drawings were avidly sought by collectors even during his lifetime.³ Among the sixteenth-century collectors of his graphic work were Francesco Melzi (1491/93–ca. 1570), who was Leonardo's pupil and artistic heir and therefore the majority owner of the great master's drawings; Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), who glued several examples onto the pages of his libro de' disegni; and the sculptor Guglielmo della Porta (d. 1577), who owned the Codex Leicester (cat. no. 114).

The present exhibition aims to offer a unified portrait of Leonardo as a draftsman, integrating his diverse roles as an artist, author, scientist, inventor, theorist, and teacher within a chronological framework that can shed light on his development. Unlike most Italian Renaissance artists, Leonardo inscribed a number of his notebooks and drawings with dates and reminders of places and purposes. His earliest extant dated drawing is the double-sided sheet of landscape studies of the Arno River and valley, which he inscribed on the upper left of the recto, "on the [feast] of Saint Mary of the Snow, on the day of August 5, 1473" (dì di s[an]ta maria della neve / addj 5 daghossto 1473). Leonardo's tendency toward record keeping may have stemmed from his family's traditional profession; his father, Ser Piero di Antonio da Vinci (1429–1504), was a notary, like many of the men in the artist's family going back to the late fourteenth century. A distinguished body of scholarship has settled numerous issues of connoisseurship in Leonardo's work, questions regarding content, context, dating, authenticity, and broad definitions of his corpus of drawings (see essay by Carlo Pedretti in the exhibition catalogue). However, the approach to Leonardo's drawings has often been thematic rather than chronologically integrated, which has led to fragmented discussions of his oeuvre. It is very clear from his writings that Leonardo considered his diverse endeavors complementary.

This is the first comprehensive international-loan exhibition of Leonardo's work in America, and it is among the largest ever attempted,⁴ comprising 147 drawings and 1 painting, the unfinished Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness from the Vatican Museums (cat. no. 46), which illustrates the artist's process of design in full scale. In the present selection, 118 works are by Leonardo, and 30 drawings are by artists relevant to his formation in Florence and activity in Milan. An attempt is made to represent drawings for most of Leonardo's major projects and through a diversity of types. Selected from public and private collections in Europe and the United States, the display gives preference to drawings that are less familiar, that have rarely been exhibited, and that have seldom been seen together. Leonardo is possibly the most written-about artist of all time. Yet as a whole the enormous literature on his drawings has neglected issues of their technique and function. In the last twenty years scholarship has moved toward a clearer understanding of art production within the socioeconomic structures of patronage in the Italian Renaissance. And during the last decade especially, historians have also gradually clarified how art in this period was produced within the material, businesslike world of the Renaissance artist's bottega, or workshop. It is against this practical background that Leonardo the draftsman needs now to be reassessed.

An exhibition can offer an important first step toward such reassessments. Here, the primary objective is to offer the general public and art historians a context in which to look attentively at Leonardo's drawings as works of art full of telling clues about their making and their use, rather than as abstract illustrations of content. The skill of drawing was the backbone of artistic production and training in the Italian Renaissance. A study by Maso Finiguerra (1426–1464) from the early 1460s portrays a young apprentice, seated presumably in an artist's workshop, in the act of drawing in a small sketchbook. The sheet is inscribed along the bottom, "I would like to be a good draftsman and I would like to become a good architect."⁵ Leonardo's sheet from the Codex Atlanticus, probably from the late 1470s to early 1480s, shows an artist drawing an armillary sphere onto a pane of glass by using a perspective frame. The great master had much advice to offer the young apprentices who were to be the readers of his intended painting treatise; the Libro di pittura (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana) was posthumously compiled from Leonardo's notes by Francesco Melzi (cat. nos. 120, 121). As Leonardo stated in the Libro di pittura, "A youth should first learn perspective, then the proportions of all things, then study with a good master.⁶ . . . Study science, then follow the practice born of that science."⁷ A note in the Codex Atlanticus, possibly dating from April 1490, further sums up Leonardo's teaching philosophy: "The painter who copies merely by practice and judgment of the eye, without reason, is like the mirror which imitates within itself all the things placed before it without cognition of their existence."⁸ Sound theory was the foundation of practice.

Leonardo's early career in Florence (until his departure for Milan sometime between 1481 and 1483) merits particular attention, and here the reader of the present catalogue will find a number of proposed changes in the chronology of his drawings established by previous scholarship (cat. nos. 13–46). In an effort to clarify the young Leonardo's roots as a draftsman, the present exhibition gathers together a significant group of nine drawings by Andrea del Verrocchio (cat. nos. 1–6, 8 verso, 9, 10), the great sculptor and painter who was Leonardo's teacher. Only slightly more than a handful of sheets by Verrocchio are extant, and these reveal that innovations usually credited to Leonardo may have begun in Verrocchio's workshop. The innovations include the quick sketching of figures from different points of view (cat. no. 4), the sfumato technique of rendering shadows with charcoal or chalk (cat. nos. 1–3, 5, 6), and the measured survey drawings of the proportions of the horse (cat. nos. 9, 10). Leonardo probably entered Verrocchio's workshop in the 1460s (see Chronology), and it was there, one may argue, that he probably acquired a new approach to drawing, along with the more traditional skills and working habits that were largely expected in professions still governed by a medieval guild system. Speaking later from the vantage point of the teacher, Leonardo advised in a note from 1490–92, in Paris Ms. A, "the artist should first exercise his hand by copying drawings from the hand of a good master."⁹ Among the highlights of Verrocchio's career as a draftsman are exquisite full-scale drawings, or cartoons, of the heads of young women (cat. nos. 1, 3), which according to Vasari the young Leonardo closely imitated in style and technique¹⁰ but of which practically nothing survives in his oeuvre.¹¹ Unfortunately for modern connoisseurs, the practice of precise imitation favored in the workshops of Verrocchio and other artists of the period often makes it difficult to distinguish the hand of the master from that of his pupils. One such gifted pupil, Lorenzo di Credi, was Leonardo's younger colleague in Verrocchio's workshop and became the artistic heir of Verrocchio when he died in Venice in 1488. The exhibition includes two studies attributed to Credi (cat. nos. 7, 8 recto); one of these sheets may have come from a sketchbook by Verrocchio himself, to judge from the handwriting (cat. no. 8 verso). (All his life Leonardo would be a diligent keeper of sketchbooks and notebooks.) A page from another dismembered sketchbook (cat. no. 12), from 1487–88, is also by an artist connected with Verrocchio's workshop, who is probably to be identified as Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, and further illustrates the types of compendia that were current in Verrocchio's sphere of influence.

In 1472 the twenty-year-old Leonardo was inscribed in the account book (Libro rosso: Debitori, creditori e ricordi) of the painter's confraternity, the Compagnia di San Luca, in Florence, and the schedule of payment of his dues began in June of that year. This fact may be taken to mark the conclusion of Leonardo's apprenticeship and the beginning of his career as a professional painter, though he seems to have stayed with Verrocchio until at least 1476 (when he was accused twice of sodomy), probably as a collaborator. From Verrocchio, a highly successful master who was primarily a sculptor, Leonardo seems to have learned an approach to design and a visual culture that were fairly singular at a time when Renaissance painters looked to disegno (design and drawing) and rilievo (relief) as the shaping forces of their art. The young Leonardo's work from the 1470s onward reveals a refined plastic conception of form (cat. nos. 13–21). The exhibition gathers five early drapery studies attributed to him (cat. nos. 13–17), painted with the brush in ink, wash, and gouache on linen (see essay by Françoise Viatte in the exhibition catalogue). According to Vasari's biography of Leonardo, the precocious artist copied real draperies, which had been dipped in wet clay slip and then arranged on a clay mannequin.¹² Some of Verrocchio's other pupils also produced carefully executed drapery studies, and this has led to questions regarding the attribution to Leonardo of some of the early drapery studies painted on linen. The teaching practices in Verrocchio's workshop probably inspired Leonardo's later attempts (in his projected Libro di pittura) to describe the designs of draperies by means of a nearly academic classification of the disposition and movement of folds.¹³

For the young Leonardo, a potentially more significant legacy from his teacher Verrocchio may have been his method of inventing compositions in quick sketches. This process is recorded in Verrocchio's sheet in the Louvre (cat. no. 4), which explores a sequence of poses for an infant seen from a number of different points of view. It represents a sculptor's way of visualizing form. Leonardo's sketches for the so-called Madonna of the Cat (cat. no. 19) from about 1478–80 similarly portray the figural motifs from a variety of views. His initial sketches also integrate wash to obtain a remarkably sculptural chiaroscuro that functions as a dynamic, unifying element of the composition. Early examples of this technique are another sketch for the Madonna of the Cat (cat. no. 18) and the Young Woman Bathing an Infant (cat. no. 21) from Oporto.

The young Leonardo's refined control of tone with the traditional fifteenth-century technique of metalpoint drawing on prepared paper is already evident in sheets from the early to mid-1480s (cat. nos. 39–45, 53). These reveal an exquisitely unified use of parallel hatching, often with nearly pitch-straight lines for a soft relieflike effect of the forms on the paper (see my essay). Leonardo would continue to use the difficult, linear medium of metalpoint until the mid-1490s (cat. nos. 61–63, 66). Many of his drawings suggest that he first began sketching lightly and cautiously with the metal stylus (cat. nos. 41, 43, 53), then gradually reinforced strokes to define the final outlines and to build up a density of tone in the shadows; mistakes or unwanted lines in metalpoint cannot easily be erased. His materials essentially conform to those described in Cennino Cennini's Libro dell'arte (manuscript before 1437).¹⁴ The paper is coated with a mixture of finely pulverized bone, color (from mineral sources), lead white, and glue; in his early drawings, this preparation is usually fairly thick and stiff and burnished to a slight shimmer. Leonardo appears to have favored the use of silverpoints (rather than styluses made with other alloyed metals), conforming again to the preference expressed in Cennino's Libro; two of Leonardo's fragmentary notes from 1490 and 1491 refer casually to silver styluses.¹⁵ He often reworked his metalpoint drawings with pen and dark brown ink, to clarify the final outlines and to darken the shadows (cat. nos. 20, 25, 38, 40, 45, 66). He also frequently added white gouache highlights, according to Cennino's recipe of "a little lead white well worked up with gum arabic" dissolved in water. Three studies of animals in metalpoint on pink-beige prepared paper (cat. nos. 41–43) are here dated to 1480–85. The technique used in these drawings falls between that of the late studies for the Adoration of the Magi (cat. no. 40) and that of the study for the Sforza equestrian monument (cat. no. 53). The sheet of bear studies (cat. no. 43) also contains an underlying sketch of a pregnant woman who seems nearly identical in physical type to the Virgin in the British Museum double-sided sheet (cat. no. 20) that is associated with the Benois Madonna (State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg) from 1478–80. The figural types in the British Museum sheet also reflect those of the early Madonna of the Carnation (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Another reason for dating Leonardo's animal studies in metalpoint to the first half of the 1480s is that their style and technique more closely conform to the animal studies being done in this medium by contemporary Florentine artists.¹⁶

Leonardo's work as an independent painter in Florence culminated in his altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi, Florence), contracted by the monks, the Canonici Regolari, of San Donato a Scopeto in July 1481 and mediated by his father, Ser Piero da Vinci. Alessandro Cecchi's essay offers new evidence of the role of Ser Piero in securing commissions for his son through his contacts as a practicing notary in Florence. The exhibition gathers almost half of the extant sketches and studies that seem related to the design of the Adoration of the Magi (cat. nos. 27–32, 36–40), which Leonardo left unfinished on his departure for Milan in 1481–83. The picture is a virtual brush drawing on the wood panel. Some of the animated quick sketches (cat. nos. 29–32, 38) call to mind Leonardo's advice to young painters to keep a small sketchbook for a nearly journalistic observation of the human figure in various poses or attitudes (atti):

And with slight strokes take a note in a little book which you should always carry with you. It should be of tinted paper, that it may not be rubbed out, and when full exchange the old book for a new one; since these things should be preserved with great care. The forms and positions of objects are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them. Keep these sketches as your guides and masters.¹⁷

His panel of Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness (cat. no. 46), for which there are no extant directly preparatory studies, is in a state of unfinish similar to that of the Adoration of the Magi altarpiece. It therefore permits an extraordinary glimpse into Leonardo's creative process at a stage between the drawings on paper and the laying in of the full-scale design on the primed painting surface. The design of the saint's head was produced by means of a cartoon. Attentive examination of the paint surface reveals the presence of Leonardo's fingerprints on the upper left of the composition (see discussion in cat. no. 46 in the exhibition catalogue). The Vatican Saint Jerome probably dates from not long after the Uffizi Adoration, considering that its composition is echoed in early designs for a Nativity (cat. no. 45; Windsor, RL 12560) and that it shares compositional elements with the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks, contracted in 1483. As scholars often note, the motif of the Virgin adoring the Christ Child in the center of catalogue number 45 may represent an initial idea from about 1483 to 1485 for the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks, the main panel of the altarpiece that is to be identified with Leonardo's earliest documented commission in 1483 on his arrival in Milan. (See Chronology for the complex, acrimonious development of this project.) Among Leonardo's great innovations as a draftsman was his emphasis on the freshness of the sketching process. In the sheet that seems to anticipate the conception of the Virgin of the Rocks (cat. no. 45), alternative designs for the composition and of other closely related motifs pour out in fluent sequences of sketches. One idea led to another idea, which he then completed with the outlines of the intended picture frames (see essay by Martin Kemp in the exhibition catalogue). A passage from Leonardo's notes, as it is recorded in the Libro di pittura, describes the creative flux of sketching:

You, composer of pictures, however, do not draw the limbs on your figures with finished outlines or it will happen to you, as to many different painters who wish every little stroke of charcoal to be definitive. . . . Decide broadly on the position of the limbs of your figures and attend first to the movements appropriate to the mental attitudes of the creatures in the narrative, rather than to the beauty and quality of their limbs.¹⁸

As poetic exercises in the invention of subject matter, Leonardo's drawings of allegories (cat. nos. 54, 67, 68) appear to reflect the refined literary tastes of the Sforza court. In 1490 he staged the Paradiso by his friend the Florentine poet Bernardo Bellincioni (1452–1492), who arrived in Milan in 1485 and remained there until his death. Leonardo's apparent delight in actively participating in the pageantry of the Sforza court can also be inferred from extant records of other theatrical performances (particularly plentiful for the 1490s), as well as from his sketches of emblems, costumes, and stage sets (cat. no. 68). The nearly seventeen years that he spent at the Sforza court (from 1482–83 until 1499), which was a way station for some of the brilliant minds of the period, proved especially productive for his career, for he also emerged as a theorist, scientist, and author of treatises. Leonardo wrote a number of reminders and lists of the books in his possession (dating from the early 1490s to 1505), which suggest the diversity of his interests and reading (see essay by Carlo Vecce in the exhibition catalogue).²¹ He also befriended Donato Bramante (1443/44?–1514), the great painter, architect, and geometrist from Urbino, who resided in Milan from at least 1481 onward, as well as Fra Luca Pacioli (ca. 1445–ca. 1514), the Franciscan mathematician and student of perspective, who arrived in 1496. During his brief journeys to Milan in 1490 and before, Francesco di Giorgio (1439–1501), the versatile Sienese artist, architect, and engineer, became Leonardo's friend and rival in the competition to design the domed crossing tower (tiburio) of Milan Cathedral (see discussion in cat. no. 55 in the exhibition catalogue). Leonardo's exploration of proportion, perspective, geometry, and architectural design (cat. nos. 53 verso, 56) benefited from these exchanges in no small measure.

As Leonardo contemplated the writing of his treatises—on the human body; the elements of machines; the phenomena of light, shadow, and perspective; the movement of water; and the flight of birds—he sought a clarity of visual description that was equal to the logic of his empirical observation. He is often credited with devising the consistent method of depicting buildings and their parts in plan, section, and perspectival massing in architectural drawings from the late 1480s to 1490s. He would also gradually apply this more precise system of describing three-dimensional form in a number of other endeavors. Leonardo's earliest anatomical drawings seem to date from 1488 to 1492. The illustration of the main organs related to the blood vessels (cat. no. 57), which he entitled the "Tree of the Veins" in an inscription between the man's legs, is partly based on animal dissection and partly derived from previous anatomical writings. Human dissections were extremely regulated and usually performed only on the corpses of criminals. Luca Landucci's Diary from 1450–1516 describes the dissection of the body of a young man who had been hanged on January 24, 1505; conducted for six days in rooms at Santa Croce in Florence, it was attended by many doctors and university scholars (including Landucci's son) after permission was granted by the republic's office, the Otto di Guardia e Balìa.²² There is extant written evidence of only one human full-body dissection by Leonardo, dating from much later, in 1510 (see cat. no. 113). Begun in 1489, his series of accurately observed studies of the human skull (cat. no. 58) reveal a neat, treatiselike disposition of image and text on the page (as well as the technique of exquisitely fine parallel hatching that is typical of engravings from this period). Leonardo's skull drawings offer the most original and lasting contribution of his early anatomical research. The rigorously systematic method of portrayal in sections and in representative angles of view was unprecedented. His convention of illustrating anatomical details in sections, seen from the front, side, and top views, is indebted to the "plan and elevation" technique used in Piero della Francesca's De prospectiva pingendi (manuscript written before 1482),²³ a treatise that Leonardo knew from his experience as a perspectivist and as a friend of Fra Luca Pacioli. As the Renaissance understood it, "perspective" was the systematic application of "proportion" to form placed within space. For Leonardo, anatomy and proportion were two sides of the same coin, and he planned to integrate the two aspects in his projected treatise on the human body (see cat. no. 86).

In his role as a theorist of painting, Leonardo repeatedly emphasized that the most formidable challenge facing a good painter was the portrayal of man and the intentions of the mind (le passioni dell'anima) through the body's physical capacity for gesture (cat. no. 66). His views are more fully recorded in the posthumously compiled Libro di pittura.²⁴ Leonardo appears to have finished writing a (lost) treatise on the moti mentali, or motions of the mind, before 1499, when he left Milan after the city fell to the French.²⁵ In his conception of the ages of man, the fleeting beauty of youth would often be pathetically juxtaposed with the decay and deformity of old age. From the late 1480s to the mid-1490s, his preoccupation with the human face (its proportions, expressions, and deterioration with age) would lead to some of his most penetrating studies of grotesque physiognomy (see cat. nos. 59, 60, 69–76). Yet not all his studies of grotesque physiognomy should be dated to this period, for such heads constitute a frequently recurring theme in Leonardo's drawings. Examples exist in his work ranging from the 1470s to the 1510s (see cat. nos. 24, 59, 60, 69–76, 92). Moreover, his pupil Francesco Melzi, who came to live in his household about 1508, closely imitated the series of small "caricatures" down to the left-handed strokes in Leonardo's originals (cat. no. 121). The drawings of grotesque heads also constitute the genre that made Leonardo famous in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through the wide dissemination of countless copies and reproductive prints, when so much of his original work was inaccessible (see essay by Varena Forcione in the exhibition catalogue). A page from the Libro di pittura offers Leonardo's telling classification of nose types as a memory aid in drawing heads in profile; many of these are grotesquely deformed.²⁶ This type of classification was a teaching device primarily meant for pupils. The small selection of finished studies by Leonardo's Milanese pupils and followers that concludes the present exhibition reflects the fact that, at least in their drawings, the "Leonardeschi" were most often interested in renderings of the human head and its potential for expression. The theory of the moti mentali was yet another of Leonardo's major legacies as a teacher (see essay by Pietro C. Marani in the exhibition catalogue). The studies of heads by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, the Master of the Pala Sforzesca, Francesco Melzi, Andrea Solario, Bernardino Luini, and Giovanni Agostino da Lodi vividly attest that, at times, they could take Leonardo's styles and techniques to inspired heights (cat. nos. 120–33).

Leonardo's contribution to the design process of narrative compositions is arguably his greatest as a draftsman. Although one can identify a precedent in the second half of the fifteenth century for almost every drawing type used in the High Renaissance, it is clear that Leonardo expanded the nuances of narrative invention enormously. In the case of his mural of the Last Supper (Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan), painted in 1493–98, however, the evidence regarding his overall process of developing the composition is frustratingly sparse (this type of evidence seems more complete for his projects from after 1503). The spirited thumbnail sketches for the Last Supper on the upper part of the Windsor sheet (cat. no. 65) suggest that he began with a fairly conventional arrangement, with much less physical and psychological interaction among the figures, and with Judas seated on the opposite side of the table from Christ and the apostles. The early study in reworked metalpoint on blue prepared paper that is often thought to portray Saint Peter (cat. no. 66) seems closer in date to the Windsor composition sketch. The later studies in chalk for the heads and hands of the apostles are considerably more pictorial in effect (Windsor, RL 12543–12552).

In the mid- to late 1490s Leonardo turned increasingly to drawing media such as charcoal, black chalk, and red chalk that were easily smudged or blended to create exquisitely graded effects of light and shadow (cat. nos. 74–77).²⁷ He was among the earliest artists to use red chalk (cat. nos. 75–77). Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo's Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura et archittetura (Milan, 1584) states that Leonardo also frequently used pastels (fabricated colored chalks) as a medium for drawing, citing the example of his studies for the heads of the apostles in the Last Supper; no such securely attributed drawings by Leonardo are extant.²⁸ The great master's own notes refer to pastels, and one describes a recipe for their making.²⁹ Attributed to Leonardo by a long tradition (but sometimes unjustly disputed), the fragile portrait cartoon of Isabella d'Este (Musée du Louvre, Paris) from 1500–1501 is regarded by most scholars as the first extant example in Italy to incorporate some pastel pigments into its complex drawing technique. The present exhibition includes a selection of large-scale pastel drawings by Leonardo's earliest pupil, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (cat. nos. 127, 128), as well as by his more distant Lombard followers, Bernardino Luini (cat. no. 131) and Andrea Solario (cat. no. 129), to illustrate the impact of Leonardo's new pastel technique on North Italian artists.

Shortly after 1500–1501, when Leonardo returned to Florence after an absence of nearly seventeen years, he seems to have regained instant fame by publicly exhibiting a monumental cartoon portraying the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and a Lamb. According to Vasari's biography of Leonardo, this cartoon enjoyed an enormously positive critical reception (which was more typically accorded to finished works of art), and for two days crowds of artists, women, and laymen came to admire Leonardo's cartoon in his private quarters at Santissima Annunziata.³⁰ This may or may not have been the same cartoon that Fra Pietro da Novellara carefully described in a letter from 1501 to Isabella d'Este.³¹ The cartoon (or cartoons) of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne from 1500–1501 has not survived, but one may judge Leonardo's exquisite drawing technique from the Burlington House cartoon (National Gallery, London), which depicts a similar subject and probably dates from 1507–8. His scaled overall sketch for this later cartoon (cat. no. 96) demonstrates that movement and compositional unity were for him dominant artistic concerns. The greatly debated problem of Leonardo's versions on the theme of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, however, seems far from resolved. The studies relating to the composition of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne that are exhibited here appear to conform better with Leonardo's ideas from 1506–8 and after (cat. nos. 95, 96, 105–9). In assessing Leonardo's drawings for the Saint Annes, as with those for the Leda and the Swan (cat. nos. 98–100), it may be necessary to distinguish between the dates of the original ideas or designs and the dates of execution of the studies.

According to Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini, Leonardo's cartoon for the Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo's cartoon for the Battle of Cascina received spectacular critical acclaim, and the works served to teach the younger generation of artists—in Cellini's words, the cartoons were a "school for the world" (scuola del mondo).³² Only partly completed and no longer extant, these much-admired cartoons by the greatest artistic rivals of the Renaissance were intended to serve as full-scale working drawings in painting murals on opposite walls in the Sala del Gran Consiglio (Great Council Hall) of the Palazzo della Signoria, Florence. The progress of the work on the projects can be charted from the detailed records of payment for materials and labor that are extant in the Archivio di Stato of Florence (see Chronology).³³ The Battle of Anghiari was commissioned from Leonardo about October 1503, and in the spring of 1505, although he had not completed the preliminary cartoon, he began executing a small part of the composition in a ruinous experimental technique of oil (apparently with some tempera grassa) on the dry wall. Michelangelo's competing Battle of Cascina was commissioned almost a year later, in the late summer of 1504, and was meant to be painted in a traditional fresco technique, but may never have been begun on the wall. The present exhibition gathers a group of ten drawings by Leonardo for the Battle of Anghiari cartoon (cat. nos. 81–88, 90, 91), as well as the famous monumental copy after the main episode of the Fight for the Standard that was reworked by Peter Paul Rubens (cat. no. 135).

In the introduction to his Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori (Florence, 1550 and 1568),³⁴ Vasari described an orderly process of preliminary drawings based on the legacy of High Renaissance practice. According to Vasari, artists first drew schizzi (sketches). Sketches were supposed to resemble "the form of a stain" (in forma di una macchia) and were meant only as a rough draft of the compositional idea, "to find the manner of the poses" (per trovar il modo delle attitudine). Leonardo's small pen-and-ink sketches for the Battle of Anghiari exemplify the extemporaneous and abstract quality of this drawing type (cat. nos. 81–83). Here, the ideas pour onto the paper with little precision of pictorial notation. Leonardo spoke quite candidly about the stream-of-consciousness solutions arising from the intuitive process of exploration, and his approach was a great conceptual breakthrough for the history of art.³⁵ His justly famous passage in Paris Ms. A, from 1490–92, exhorts young apprenticing painters to look at the suggestive forms of stains and variegated patterns on stones in order to stir the creative juices and train the eye to a process of invention:

I cannot refrain from mentioning among these precepts a new device for the imagination, which, although it may seem rather trivial and almost ludicrous, is nevertheless extremely useful in arousing the mind to various inventions. And, this is, when you look at any walls spotted with stains, or with stones of various patterns, if you have to invent some setting, you may be able to see therein a resemblance to various landscapes, graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and hills in varied arrangement; or, again, you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of things, which you can distill into well-drawn forms. And what happens with regard to such walls and variegated stones is just as with the sound of bells, in whose jangle you may find any name or word you choose to imagine.³⁶

Most probably drawn from life, the studies for the heads of the screaming soldiers in the Fight for the Standard (cat. nos. 90, 91), the central episode of the Battle of Anghiari, are the largest-scale drawings for the mural that are extant from Leonardo's own hand. After such detailed studies in chalk, and according to practices that were already typical by the mid-fifteenth century, artists enlarged the design of a composition to full scale by drawing a carefully rendered cartone (cartoon).³⁸ According to Leon Battista Alberti's theory, expressed in his treatise on painting (written in 1435–36), a drawing in large scale reveals errors in design more easily than a drawing in small scale; this advice was repeated by Leonardo in his notes and in his projected treatise on painting, the Libro di pittura.³⁹ In describing how to prepare wood panels for oil painting, Leonardo also recommended the use of pricked cartoons to transfer the design onto the working surface (see cat. no. 46).⁴⁰ This note from 1490–92 in Paris Ms. A is among the few fifteenth-century written allusions to cartoons. Leonardo's magnificent cartoon from 1503–5 portraying a monumental grotesque figure seen from the back (cat. no. 92) was probably very similar in drawing technique to the lost Battle of Anghiari cartoon. The bold, direct manner of rendering in black chalk and charcoal with aggressively hatched strokes, selective stumping in flesh areas, and vigorous reinforcement lines is typical of such large-scale drawings.

Leonardo's creative energies for the Battle of Anghiari seem to have been exhausted by 1506 (when he began to move back and forth between Florence and Milan); it is difficult to pinpoint when he stopped working on the mural project entirely. A magnificent sheet from 1506–8 (cat. no. 103) combines ideas related to the Battle of Anghiari, the standing Leda and the Swan, and possibly a statue of Hercules. His earliest thoughts for a composition of Leda and the Swan may have emerged in late 1504 or 1505, probably at the moment of his greatest involvement in the Battle of Anghiari, and thus stimulated by the problems of composing dynamic arrangements of intertwined figures. The simultaneity of conception in the two projects is evident in catalogue number 88. The sheet explores the kneeling pose of the sensuous Leda, tightly compressed within the picture field. The fairly finished Rotterdam and Chatsworth composition studies for Leda (cat. nos. 98, 99) are here displayed together, possibly for the first time. The extant copies after Leonardo's destroyed original painting show Leda standing (cat. no. 134), suggesting that, as would be true of his conception of the "Sforza Horse," when he resumed work on the Leda about 1508 he would opt for a final design that tamed agitated movement into classical restraint of gesture. Some of Leonardo's most nuanced botanical studies correspond to the design of the foreground in the lost picture (cat. no. 100).

About 1506–8, Leonardo seems to have also contemplated the design for a statue of a standing vigilant Hercules. Until very recently this project had seemed hypothetical, only a scholar's house of cards. It can be reconstructed here for the first time with the relevant drawings (cat. nos. 101–4), thanks to the more concrete evidence offered by a small sheet of sketches discovered three years ago (cat. no. 101). This sheet includes sketches of water currents at the top similar to those in the Codex Leicester (cat. no. 114) and shows the figure of Hercules front and back, demonstrating that the design was intended for a statue (see discussion in cat. no. 101 in the exhibition catalogue). Here, one may be unable to resist speculating on the possibility that Leonardo's statue was meant to compete with Michelangelo's giant marble David, placed in 1504 at the entrance of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. Toward the end of the Anghiari project, Leonardo also resumed anatomical research with great energy, as is suggested by a sheet from 1506–8 (cat. no. 104) that includes comparative studies of the legs of man and horse, along with views of the lower body of a Herculean figure. The larger-scale studies for the Battle of Anghiari (cat. nos. 90, 91), the Leda and the Swan (cat. nos. 98, 99), the Hercules (cat. no. 102), and the Neptune Commanding His Quadriga of Seahorses (cat. no. 93) illustrate the grandeur of expression of Leonardo's mature figural vocabulary.

His refined treatment of surface in some of his late drawings seems firmly grounded in his exacting scientific methods. About 1490 to 1492, as is especially apparent in Paris Ms. A and Paris Ms. C, Leonardo had begun to study empirically the physical properties of light and the gradations of shadows, describing their qualities, quantities, positioning, and shapes. His proposed treatise on light and shadow was to discuss "first the shadows and lights on opaque objects, and then on transparent bodies."⁴¹ In his later notes in Paris Ms. E, dating from 1512 to 1515, he expanded on this research considerably. For example, he explored the effects from direct, diffused, restricted, and subdued light and recorded the motion of shadows with respect to moving or stationary light sources; he distinguished "simple derived shadows" from "compound derived shadows." He integrated this research with his theories on the perspective of color (prospettiva de' colori), aerial perspective (prospettiva aerea), and the perspective of disappearance (prospettiva di perdimenti). His descriptions of the minute optical effects produced by the atmosphere that interposes between the eye and visible objects are stunning for their precision of observation. Such findings seem to have stimulated his use of highly experimental pictorial drawing techniques, particularly for the studies of the painted Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Musée du Louvre, Paris) from 1508–12. The study for the head of the Virgin (cat. no. 108) makes use of an atmospheric technique of sfumato (as if a veil of mist stood between the viewer's eye and the forms); the black and red chalks are seamlessly blended in the "manner of smoke" (to rely on Leonardo's words for the technique). He used a similar technique of sfumato to render his studies for the landscape in the picture (cat. no. 109), which focus on the optical perception of the rock formations as they are affected by light and atmospheric perspective. In the drapery studies for the figure of the Virgin, he sought intensely luminous and seamlessly built-up effects of high relief (cat. nos. 106, 107), accentuating the intensity of highlights and shadows by blending white gouache, chalks, and brown ink washes. He had already used the nearly monochromatic red-on-red technique (red chalk on paper coated with a reddish ocher preparation) in some of his studies for the heads of the apostles in the Last Supper and in drawings from 1500–1504. Yet his application of this technique in the studies for the Louvre Virgin and Child with Saint Anne achieves a much more graded tonal scale and mimetic quality of surface (see especially cat. nos. 105, 106).

In his nonartistic endeavors, Leonardo's clarity of syntax for describing both the microcosmic complexity of three-dimensional form and its macrocosmic monumentality had attained an elegant coherence of visual language by 1507–10. The level of detail and accuracy of Leonardo's directly observed dissection of an old man's arms and veins (cat. no. 113) sharply contrast with the fanciful anatomical abstraction of his "Tree of the Veins" (cat. no. 57) from 1488–92, which is largely based on the writings of Galen (A.D. ca. 130–200/210), the most celebrated of the ancient Greek medical writers, and Avicenna (980–1037), the great Arab philosopher and physician. The verso of catalogue number 113 further portrays the surface dissection of the muscles of the neck, shoulders, and arms in a sequence of rotated views of nearly cinematic effect. A similar consistency of visual description is found in the pages of Leonardo's Codex Leicester (cat. no. 114), which served as a draft for a treatise on the movement of water (see essay by Claire Farago in the exhibition catalogue).

The Codex Leicester is among the latest of Leonardo's extant notebooks. Eight double-sided pages of the Codex (dismembered in 1981; cat. no. 114), which offer a telling diversity of execution, are here exhibited with an array of Leonardo's other pen-and-ink drawings from 1508 to 1512. The Codex dates from the period broadly corresponding to his work on the famous though enigmatic funerary monument to Gian Giacomo Trivulzio (cat. no. 111), which included an equestrian statue that was never executed. The use of a tonal, somewhat scratchy curved hatching and straight parallel hatching is found in the Trivulzio design (cat. no. 111) and in some of the diagrams of the Codex (cat. no. 114, Sheet 3A, fol. 34v). In general, comparisons within the group of drawings from 1508–12 can clarify much about the artist's late pen-and-ink technique and modes of representing content. The devices in the portrayals of the minute, deeply rendered patterns of the water currents in the Codex—often seen in plans, sections, and perspectival three-quarter views—are as visually coherent as in the architectural rendering of a monumental mausoleum in an antique style (cat. no. 112). Some of the pages of the Codex vividly demonstrate that Leonardo continued to use parallel hatching in ways that can at first seem deceptively similar to his 1490s pen-and-ink drawings (cat. no. 114; Sheet 1A, fol. 1r; Sheet 2A, fol. 2r). Here, a rigorous precision of mark best served the expository functions of scientific illustration, but the hatching usually exhibits a subtly pictorial quality.⁴² Leonardo rendered the intertwined patterns of some of the foamy water currents in curving, mimetic strands of parallel hatching of deeply tonal but atmospheric effect (cat. no. 114; Sheet 13B fols. 13v, 24r; Sheet 15B, fol. 22r).

Leonardo's closely observed, analytical studies of hydrodynamics in the Codex Leicester and other notes (Windsor, RL 12659–12665) are given a great expressive purpose in his Deluge drawings (cat. nos. 115, 116), which may date from 1515–17 (although there has been considerable debate on this point), just before he went to France at the invitation of King Francis I. With the poetic force of Dante's Inferno (quoted by Leonardo on catalogue number 64 verso), the Deluge drawings portray the destructive vortices of tidal waves furiously rebounding over the diminished forms of man and nature. They are powerful works of the imagination but conceived with an eminently rationalized knowledge of the dynamic principles governing the behavior of water.

As Martin Kemp has demonstrated, Leonardo understood imagination as fantasia, the ability to recombine images or parts of images into wholly new compounds or ideas, as in his sheet of animal sketches from 1513–17 (cat. no. 117).⁴³ Here, the artist portrayed more than twenty cats in fairly orderly rows and playfully inserted the form of a striding dragon in the lower center, thus transmogrifying the curving forms of real and imagined animals in a seamlessly veristic description. Since classical antiquity, poetry had been assessed in terms of "invention" of subject matter and composition, as put forth, for example, in Horace's Ars poetica, a work that was well known to Leonardo.⁴⁴ Inspired by an ancient literary topos, Leonardo forcefully argued in his Paragone (a comparison of the arts) of the early 1490s that the painter was superior to the poet, because sight was by far greater than all other mental capacities, and "the [poet's] imagination cannot see with such excellence as the eye."⁴⁵ In Leonardo's words, "he who loses his eyes leaves his soul in a dark prison without hope of ever again seeing the sun, light of all the world.⁴⁶ The eye, which is said to be the window of the soul, is the main organ whereby man's understanding can have the most complete and magnificent view of the infinite works of nature."⁴⁷ Drawing offered him a most essential tool in capturing this magnificence of sight.

The material in this section was derived from the exhibition catalogue, Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman. Edited by Carmen C. Bambach, with contributions by Carmen C. Bambach, Alessandro Cecchi, Claire Farago, Varena Forcione, Martin Kemp, Anne-Marie Logan, Pietro C. Marani, Carlo Pedretti, Carlo Vecce, Françoise Viatte, and Linda Wolk-Simon. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2003. Distributed by Yale University Press. The catalogue is available in the Museum's bookshops and in the online Met Store. Many thanks to the Museum's Editorial Department for making portions of the exhibition catalogue available for online use.

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Footnotes

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1. Beltrami 1919a, p. 112, no. 180; Villata 1999, p. 203, no. 236; Marani 1999c, 2000b, p. 359, no. 73: "L[eonar]do da Vinci Il quale non si e portato come doueua con questa republica: perchè a preso buona somma de denaro et dato uno piccolo principio a una opera grande doueua fare." 
   
2. Vasari–Milanesi 1906, vol. 4, p. 47: "Oimè! Costui non è per far nulla, da che comincia a pensare alla fine innanzi il principio dell'opera." 
   
3. See esp. Roberts 1992. 
   
4. Surveylike exhibitions with impressively large selections of works by Leonardo and related artists were held in 1939 at the Palazzo dell'Arte, Milan, as well as in 1952 at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of Leonardo's birth in 1452. The catalogues accompanying these exhibitions offered essentially checklists of the works of art on display. Much smaller commemorative exhibitions were also held in 1952, notably that entitled Hommage à Léonard de Vinci, 1452–1519 at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. In the United States, a loan exhibition organized in 1949 by Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner (assisted by Wilhelm Suida) at the Los Angeles County Museum brought together seven original drawings by Leonardo with a body of facsimiles of his works, models of his machines, as well as drawings, paintings, and sculptures by related Florentine and Lombard artists (see Valentiner 1949). The last substantive monographic book on Leonardo as a draftsman was A. E. Popham's elegant essay-length treatment in 1945 (editions in 1946, 1947, 1949), reprinted most recently in 1994 with an introduction by Martin Kemp. Since Popham's groundbreaking book, significant drawings by Leonardo have come to light (notably the rediscovery in 1968 of his Codex Madrid in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid), opinions regarding attribution and chronology have been greatly revised, and methods of study have been considerably refined with the application of scientific technology to the investigation of Italian Renaissance drawing and painting techniques. A number of thematic exhibitions have explored specific aspects of Leonardo's draftsmanship, such as his studies of drapery, anatomy, horses, architecture, engineering, landscapes, and plants, as well as individual projects such as the mural of the Last Supper, the map of Imola, the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, the lost Leda and the Swan, and the Codex Leicester (formerly known as the Codex Hammer). These insightful displays have included relatively small selections of drawings by Leonardo, ranging from about 20 to 50 in number. Three ambitious exhibitions have attempted more surveylike treatments of Leonardo's drawings, and their accompanying catalogues have made significant scholarly contributions. The monumental exhibition in 1989 at the Hayward Gallery, London, organized by Martin Kemp and Jane Roberts, explored the universality of Leonardo's genius and offered 119 drawings with 15 three-dimensional reconstructions. Leonardo e Venezia at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, in 1992 successfully integrated a selection of drawings by Leonardo with studies, paintings, and sculptures by artists related to him, in order to establish the great artist's relation to Venice, a city that he is known to have visited in 1500. The extraordinary exhibition at the Queen's Gallery (Buckingham Palace, London) in 1996, by Martin Clayton, comprised 100 drawings by Leonardo, all selected from the rich holdings of the Royal Library at Windsor. See Kemp and Roberts 1989, Palazzo Grassi 1992, and Clayton 1996–97. 
   
5. Uffizi, Florence, 115 F: "Vo esere uno buono disegnatore . e . do/ventare uno buono archittetore." 
   
6. C. Urb., fol. 31r: "il giovane debbe prima imparare prospettiua puoi le misure dogni cosa poi di mano di bon maestro." 
   
7. C. Urb, fol. 32r: "studia prima la scientia e poi seguita la praticha nata da essa scientia." 
   
8. C. A., fol. 207 (formerly fol. 76r-a); Richter 1970, vol. 1, p. 119, no. 20: "Il pittore che ritrae per pratica e giuditio d'ochio, sanza ragione è come lo specchio, che in sé imita tutte le a sé co[n]traposte cose sanza cognitione d'esse." 
   
9. Paris Ms. A, fol. 90r (Ms. B.N. 2038, fol. 10r); Richter 1970, vol. 1, p. 303, no. 485: "Il pictore debbe prima . suefare . la mano col ritrarre . disegni . di mano di bo[n] maestro." 
   
10. Vasari–Milanesi 1906, vol. 3, pp. 333–34: "Sono alcuni disegni di sua mano nel nostro Libro, fatti con molta pacienza e grandissimo giudizio, infra i quali sono alcune teste di femina con bell'arie et acconciature di capelli, quali per la sua bellezza Lionardo da Vinci sempre imitò." 
    
11. The only such extant drawing of a young woman's head with ornate coiffure that is in the present author's opinion convincingly attributed to the young Leonardo has also been given by scholars to Andrea del Verrocchio, or alternatively to Lorenzo di Credi. This is the study Florence, Uffizi 428 E. See Rosini 1843, vol. 4, pp. 10, 17 (n. 14); Ramirez di Montalvo 1849, no. 7; Turotti 1857, no. 7; Lagrange 1862, no. 207; Uzielli 1884, no. 11; Morelli 1890, p. 226 (Flemish copy after Verrocchio); Ferri 1890, pp. 162–63; Bayersdorfer 1893, pl. 3; Ferri 1895–1901, fol. 34v; Müller-Walde 1889, p. 40; Müller-Walde 1897, p. 6; Müntz 1898, vol. 1, p. 50, pl. 3; Morelli 1900, p. 177 (n. 8; Flemish copy after Verrocchio); Berenson 1903, vol. 2, p. 179, no. 2791 (school of Verrocchio); Jacobsen 1904, p. 417; Vasari–Milanesi 1906, vol. 4, p. 64, no. 7; Thiis 1913, p. 104 (copy of Verrocchio or Leonardo); Bode 1921, p. 20; Van Marle 1923–38, vol. 9, pp. 502–3; Venturi 1925, p. 110; Commissione Vinciana 1928– , vol. 1, pl. 16; Sirén 1928, vol. 1, p. 20, vol. 2, pl. 9b; Suida 1929, p. 20; MacCurdy 1930, p. 179; Berenson 1938, vol. 2, p. 111, no. 1015a; Degenhart 1932, p. 404; Berenson 1933–34, p. 206; Palazzo dell'Arte 1939, p. 148; Carusi 1940, p. 99; Valentiner 1950, p. 129; Castelfranco 1952b, pl. 3; Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana 1952, p. 14, no. 11; Berenson 1961, vol. 2, p. 194, no. 1015a; Ottino della Chiesa 1967, pp. 90–91; Passavant 1969, p. 225; Pedretti 1973a, pp. 29, 32, 176; Annamaria Petroli Tofani in Forlani Tempesti and Petrioli Tofani 1974, no. 30; Ragghianti Collobi 1974, p. 92; Pedretti 1979c, no. 9; Petrioli Tofani 1980, no. 259; Pedretti 1982, p. 30; Vezzosi 1983–84b, pp. 134–35; Pedretti and Dalli Regoli 1985, pp. 53–54, no. 5; Petrioli Tofani 1986, p. 192, no. 428 E; Caterina Caneva in Petrioli Tofani 1992, pp. 114–15, no. 4.15; Brown 1998b, pp. 155–56, 211 (n. 42), fig. 149 (Lorenzo di Credi). 
    
12. Vasari–Milanesi 1906, vol. 4, p. 20. 
    
13. C. Urb., fols. 164v–174v. 
    
14. Cennini 1991, pp. 26–33, 40; and Cennini 1933, pp. 5–12, 18 (English translation). Examination with X-ray fluorescence and infrared reflectography of metalpoint drawings by Leonardo and his circle at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, conducted by Kristi Dahm, confirms that the medium of the studies is silverpoint, but with varying metal inclusions (technical report, November 21, 2001); research conducted with X-ray fluorescence in 1996–97 suggested that the same was true in the case of the drawings by Filippino Lippi, the most prolific fifteenth-century user of the silverpoint medium. See more detailed discussion of fifteenth-century metalpoint technique in Bambach 1997. 
    
15. Transcribed in Richter 1970, vol. 2, pp. 363–64, no. 1458; Beltrami 1919a, pp. 33–34, no. 52. 
    
16. See sheets by Lorenzo di Credi (Windsor, RL 12365) and Piero di Cosimo (Windsor, RL 12796; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam). 
    
17. Paris Ms. A, fol. 107v (B.N. 2038, fol. 27v); Richter 1970, vol. 1, p. 338, no. 571: "spesse volte nel tuo a[n]darti a spasso vedere e considerare i siti . e li atti delli omini in nel parlare, in nel co[n]te[n]dere o ridere o zuffare insieme, che atti fieno in loro . , che atti faccino i circu[m]stati . , i spartitori, i veditori d'esse cose . , e quelli notare co[n] brevi segni in questa forma su un tuo piccolo libretto, il quale tu debi se[m]pre portar co[n] teco, e sia di crate ti[n]te, accio no[n] l'abbi a sca[n]cellare ma mutare di vechio in u[n] novo, chè . queste no[n] sono cose da essere sca[n]cellate ansi co[n] gra[n] dilige[n]za riserbate . , perchè gli sono ta[n]te le infinite forme e . atti delle cose che la memoria no[n] è capace a ritenerle, o[n]de queste riserberai come tua autori e maestri." 
    
18. C. Urb., fols. 61v–62r: "Pero tu componitore delle istorie non membrifficare con terminati lineamenti le membrifficationi d'esse istorie che t'enteruera come a molti e' uari pittori interuenire suole liquali uogliono che ogni minimo segno di carbone sia ualido . . . componi grossamente le membra delle tue figure e' attendi prima alli mouimenti apropriati alli accidenti mentali de li animali componitori della storia." Leonardo's ideas on unfinish evoke the precepts given in Leon Battista Alberti's painting treatise (written in 1435–36); Alberti 1966, p. 97. 
    
19. Transcriptions in Richter 1970, vol. 2, pp. 325–27, no. 1340; Beltrami 1919a, pp. 10–11, document no. 21; Pedretti 1977, vol. 2, p. 295; Villata 1999, pp. 16–17, no. 20. 
    
20. See particularly the new documentary evidence published in Fusco and Corti 1992. 
    
21. Pedretti 1977, vol. 2, pp. 353–75. See esp. C. A., fol. 559 (formerly fol. 210r-a); Richter 1970, vol. 2, pp. 366–68, no. 1469; Codex Madrid II, fols. 2v–3r; Ladislao Reti in Codex Madrid 1974, vol. 5, pp. 5–8. 
    
22. Landucci 1927, p. 217. 
    
23. Bambach [Cappel] 1994a; Bambach 1999a, pp. 224–28. 
    
24. See C. Urb., fols. 122r–127v; selection translated in Kemp 1989c, pp. 144–46. 
    
25. Kwakkelstein 1993b. 
    
26. C. Urb., fol. 108v. 
    
27. Bambach 1999a, pp. 249–64; Ames-Lewis 2001; Ames-Lewis 2002. 
    
28. Lomazzo 1973–74, vol. 2, p. 170. 
    
29. C. A., fol. 669 (formerly fol. 247r-a); Richter 1970, vol. 2, p. 349, no. 1379: "piglia da Gian di Paris il modo de colorire a secco"; Codex Forster II.2, fol. 159r; Richter 1970, vol. 1, p. 339, no. 612: "Per fare pu[n]te da colorire a secco; la te[m]pera co[n] vn po' di ciera e no[n] cascherà, la qual ciera disoluerai co[n] acqua, che, tenperata la biacca, essa acqua stillata se ne vada in fumo a rima[n]ga la ciera sola, e farai bone pu[n]te; Ma sappi che bisogna macinare i colori colla pietra calda"; Fiorio 1997b; McGrath 1994; McGrath 1997. 
    
30. Vasari–Milanesi 1906, vol. 4, p. 38; Bambach 1999a, pp. 249–59. 
    
31. Beltrami 1919a, pp. 65–66, no. 107; Villata 1999, pp. 134–35, no. 150; Marani 1999c, 2000b, p. 349, no. 36. 
    
32. Vasari–Milanesi 1906, vol. 4, pp. 41–42, vol. 7, pp. 159–61; Cellini 1971, p. 82: "Stetteno questi dua cartoni, uno innel palazzo de' Medici, ed uno alla sala del Papa. In mentre che gli stettono in piè, furno la scuola del mondo." 
    
33. Transcribed in Frey 1909; Morozzi 1988–89; Bambach 1999b. Since Johannes Wilde's article in 1944, it has often been assumed that the Battle murals by Leonardo and Michelangelo were intended for the east wall of the Sala del Gran Consiglio of the Palazzo della Signoria (summary in Farago 1994). H. Travers Newton and John R. Spencer's complex and much debated proposal, however, argues instead for the murals' placement on the west wall (Travers Newton and Spencer 1982). That argument is strengthened by the reconstruction of the tribune ensemble proposed in Rubinstein 1995, pp. 104–15. Nicolai Rubinstein convincingly noted that the gonfaloniere and signori would have had more direct access to a tribune on the west wall, as their quarters were in the west wing of the palazzo. The general dimensions in Florentine braccia of the Sala del Gran Consiglio, before Vasari's drastic rebuilding are known from the vita of Simone Pollaiuolo "Il Cronaca"; Vasari 1966– , vol. 4 [testo], pp. 241–44. Francesco Albertini's Memoriale of 1510 more generally states the dimensions in braccia for the length and width of the Sala which agree—as much as can be expected—with Vasari's dimensions given in the vita of "Il Cronaca"; Horne 1909, p. 17. Based on the Florentine braccio at 58.36 cm, as well as on the quantities of paper that Leonardo and Michelangelo bought for their monumental preliminary cartoons, one can estimate the dimensions for the projected Battle murals in the Sala del Gran Consiglio to have been close to 8 meters in height and 20 meters in width. On this and other vexing questions regarding the reconstruction of Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina, see Wilde 1944; Neufeld 1949; Wilde 1953; Gould 1954a; Isermeyer 1964; Pedretti 1968b, pp. 53–86; Kemp 1981, pp. 234–35, 245; Travers Newton and Spencer 1982; Rubinstein 1987; Morozzi 1988–89; Zöllner 1991; Rubinstein 1991; Farago 1994; Rubinstein 1995, pp. 43–46, 66–78, 97–101, 214–15; Farago 1996a; Cecchi 1996; Cecchi and Natali 1996–97, pp. 40–46, 102–29, nos. 15–24; Zöllner 1998; Bambach 1999a, pp. 33–80; Bambach 1999b. 
    
34. Vasari–Milanesi 1906, vol. 1, pp. 174–77. 
    
35. See esp. Gombrich 1954, 1976, pp. 58–63. 
    
36. Paris Ms. A, fol. 102v (B.N. 2038, fol. 22v); Richter 1970, vol. 1, p. 311, no. 508: "Modo d'aume[n]tare e destare lo i[n]giegnio a varie i[n]ue[n]tioni./ Non resterò però di mettere i[n]tra questi precietti una nova i[n]ue[n]tione di speculatione, . la quale . be[n]chè paia . piccola . e quasi degnia di riso, no[n]dimeno è di grande vtilità . a destrare lo ingegno a varie inve[n]tioni, e questa . è . se tu riguarderai in alcuni mvri inbrattati di uarie machie o pietre di uari misti, se avrai a i[n]uentionare qualche sito . potrai . lì . uedere similitudine di diuersi paesi, ornati di mo[n]tagnie, fiumi, sassi, albori, pianvre, gra[n]di valli e colli in diuersi modi, . ancora vi potrai vedere diuerse battaglie e atti pro[n]ti di figure . , strane arie di uolti . e abiti . e infinite cose. , le quali potrai ridurre in i[n]tegra . e bona . forma . , e i[n]terviene i[n] simili mvri e misti come del suono di ca[m]pane . che ne' loro tochi vi troverai ogni nome e vocabolo che tu i[m]maginerai." 
    
37. Paris Ms. A, fol. 88v (B.N. 2038, fol. 8v); Richter 1970, vol. 1, p. 340, no. 579: "Il bozzare delle storie sia pronto . e 'l me[m]brificare . no[n] sia troppo . finito , sia co[n]tenvto . solame[n]te a siti d'esse me[m]bra"; transcribed almost exactly by Francesco Melzi in the C. Urb., fol. 34r. 
    
38. Vasari–Milanesi 1906, vol. 1, pp. 174–76. 
    
39. Alberti 1966, p. 94. For Leonardo's elaboration, see Paris Ms. A, fol. 94v (B.N. 2038, fol. 14v); Richter 1970, vol. 1, p. 322, no. 533: "come . nelle . cose . piccole no[n] s'inte[n]de . li errori . come nelle gra[n]di." See C. Urb., fol. 46v. 
    
40. Paris Ms. A, fol. 1r; Richter 1970, vol. 1, p. 362, no. 628. 
    
41. Ar., fol. 171r; Richter 1970, vol. 1, p. 164, no. 110: "primo de o[n]bra e lumi de'corpi densi e poi de'corpi trasparenti." 
    
42. Relevant comparisons are to anatomical drawings of 1508–9, the Demonstration of the Bladder of Man (Windsor, RL 19054r) and the Cerebral Ventricles (Windsor, RL 19127r). 
    
43. Kemp 1977; Kemp 1981, pp. 152–212. 
    
44. Paris Ms. G, fol. 8r; Richter 1970, vol. 2, p. 373, no. 1495: "vedi primo la poetica d'Oratio." 
    
45. C. Urb. fol. 5v; Richter 1970, vol. 1, Paragone, p. 18, no. 18: "Non vede l'immaginatione cotal eccellentia qual vede l'occhio." See esp. Farago 1992. 
    
46. C. Urb. fol. 13r; Richter 1970, vol. 1, Paragone, p. 40, no. 16: "ma chi li (occhi) perde, lascia essa anima in una oscura priggione, doue si perde ogni speranza di rivider il sole, luce di tutt' il mondo." 
    
47. C. Urb. fol. 8r; Richter 1970, vol. 1, Paragone, p. 56, no. 23: "L'occhio, che si dice finestra dell'anima, è la principal uia, donde il comune senso pò più copiosa et magnificamente considerare l'infinite opere di natura."